Before We Fall Apart
by x Hemlock x
Summary: The Marauders aren't the only students getting into trouble at Hogwarts—others are just better at not getting caught. A series of one-shots of Lily and Severus's adventures.
1. Chapter 1: Fire Burn and Cauldron Bubble

**_Chapter synopsis:_** _Lily drags Severus out of bed after curfew for a midnight adventure, but Hogwarts hides a great many unusual objects, some more dangerous than others._

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**Fire Burn and Cauldron Bubble**

"What are we doing here, Lily," Severus asked, fighting back a yawn.

Lily threw him an impish smile and pushed open a heavy wooden door. "You'll see."

The door creaked, the sound echoing down the deserted corridor, loud enough that, had they not been in an abandoned part of the castle, Severus might have worried that Filch would hear. The elderly caretaker didn't come running, though, and Lily tugged Severus's hand to pull him into the derelict classroom.

The light from their wands snaked into the room, and the two students crept in after it. It bounced off dark walls covered in a flaky, black residue, and over a floor carpeted with a layer of dust so thick that it looked like dirty snow. A clear set of footprints marred the uniformity, leading to the centre of the room where a dark shape sat.

Lily led the way further into the room. "Remus told me that there are loads of deserted rooms around the castle with odd objects in them. We found this one during our prefect rounds before Filch kicked us back to the main part of the castle."

The light from their wands fell over the dark shape. It was a cauldron—big enough to fit a fully-grown person, but ancient enough that it might well have been as old as Hogwarts. Lumps and dents warped the tarnished surface, and blackened crud covered it from rim to foot. It looked even worse than Severus's second-hand one.

Severus glanced from it to Lily's excited face and frowned. "I don't understand."

Lily huffed and rolled her eyes, an annoying habit she'd picked up from one of her other friends. "Look closer."

Severus brushed off a hint of irritation and stepped up to the cauldron. It was even dirtier up close, but something stood out beneath the peeling gunk. With the frayed sleeve of his greying robes, he wiped away some of the dirt. The wand-light shone over gold patterns carved into the surface of the cauldron, and Severus's eyes widened.

He turned to see Lily watching him and bouncing on the balls of her feet. The moment their eyes met, a grin lit up her face and stole Severus's breath. His mind stuttered, and the next thing he knew, Lily knelt beside the cauldron, talking a mile a minute.

"It's engraved with runes. The same set over and over again. I don't know most of them, but this one"—she pointed to one that looked like a kneeling house-elf—"means 'to implore' or 'to beseech'. Like it's a plea or an adjuration for something."

Severus wiped away more of the soot and tried to make sense of the odd little symbols that covered the entire cauldron in a looping spiral. "Have you tried using it?"

"No. I wanted to try it with you."

A smile flitted across his thin lips. She hadn't invited any of her other friends on this adventure, only him. That warmed him to the bone, knowing that the rift that had been growing between them was nothing more than a passing phase.

Lily used the Water-Making Charm to fill the cauldron, and Severus cast a spell to light a small fire beneath it. They stepped back, uncertain on how to proceed in their experimentation, but the minute the water started to bubble, the steam billowing from the cauldron turned yellow and the runes began to glow, brighter and brighter until Lily and Severus had to cover their eyes. When eventually the glow faded, the two students peaked into the cauldron and gasped.

"That isn't possible," Lily whispered, eyes wide and staring at a single loaf of bread. "Food is one of the five Principal Exceptions to Gamp's Law of Elemental Transfiguration."

"It's impossible to make food out of nothing," Severus agreed, voice low and reverent. A million possibilities for what this cauldron could be used for ran through his head. First and foremost, though, he wanted to know how it worked.

He took a step closer, but as he did so, the cauldron burped. One loaf of bread turned into two, and then three, and four, multiplying faster than Severus could keep track.

When the bread reached the top of the cauldron and kept multiplying, Lily spoke, a note of worry creeping into his name, "Sev?"

At the sound of her voice, the cauldron paused in its bread-making. Then it rumbled, loud enough to shake the room, and the bread liquified, turning into black sludge. It didn't stop coming out of the cauldron, faster and faster like a geyser.

"Sev!" Lily shouted. She grabbed his hand, and they ran for the door.

The wave of black goo got to them first, picking them up off their feet and hurtling them from the room. Severus clutched Lily's hand, refusing to let go even as the tidal wave buffeted them. There was no time to think or act. His heart pounded in his chest and his breathing came in short gasps. They sped through the hallway, stone walls passing in a blur, until in the blink of an eye, the wave slowed, stopped, and receded. The momentum pushed Lily and Severus onwards, and they slid across the floor, coming to a halt next to a pillar of purple fabric.

Severus glanced up and, at the sight of Albus Dumbledore, scrambled to his feet, pulling Lily up after him.

The headmaster smiled at the pair of them, his wand still pointed at the black goo, which was slithering back to where it had come from. "I see you have found one of Helga Hufflepuff's many prototypes."

"We're sorry, Professor," said Lily, the words tumbling out so quickly that they blended together. "We only wanted to see what it could do."

"Of course. Curiosity is the sign of a healthy mind, Miss Evans." His eyes twinkled, and he pocketed his wand, sweeping his arm towards the end of the corridor. "Let me escort you back to your common rooms, and you can tell me what discoveries you have made."

As Lily gave a step-by-step of their findings, Severus glanced back at the room with the cauldron in time to see the sludge give him a blobby wave before it slammed the door shut. His eyes lingered on that door his mind considering the secrets it hid, the knowledge it could reveal.

Adrenaline still pumped through his veins, adding a skip to his step and a giddiness to his mood, and he grudgingly understood what those Gryffindors meant when they called it an addictive experience.

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_**A/N:**_ Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed it, and feel free to leave comments and feedback. I always want to improve my writing!


	2. Chapter 2: The Beautiful Briny

_**Chapter synopsis:**__ Lily'__s__ and Severus's day takes an unexpected turn towards a 'Bedknobs and Broomsticks' kind of adventure._

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**The Beautiful Briny**

"How pleasant," Lily sang, "bobbing along, bobbing along on the bottom of the beautiful briny sea. What a chance—"

"What are you doing?" Severus asked, his words sharp and echoing in the darkness. His tone made him wince, and he bit down on his lip as Lily turned his way.

Her pale face shone like a beacon in the low light, ghostly in the complete blackness that surrounded them. The harsh wand-light deepened her frown lines and hardened the scowl she threw at him for snapping at her.

"It's a song from a film," she said, hugging her knees to her chest. She sat at the head of the bed with a pillow propped behind her.

A shadow snaked past her shoulder. Severus peered into the dark, trying to decide if it was a weed, an eel, or the giant squid coming to investigate this odd scene, a scene that Severus still couldn't wrap his head around. Never in his wildest dreams about Hogwarts had he imagined himself trapped at the bottom of the Great Lake, a giant air bubble the only thing standing between him and the icy black water.

Severus took a brief moment to picture what might happen if that shadow decided to burst the bubble—the water suddenly crashing down on him and Lily, the cold rushing in while the air left their lungs. His gut twisted, and he shook off the image.

The few times his mother had regaled him with stories of her years at Hogwarts, nothing like this had ever featured. This was trouble the like of which only Gryffindors got into. He was sure of it. Certainly, this mess had been caused by Gryffindors, although for once, Potter and his ilk were innocent. The super-powered Bubble-Head Charm was well beyond anything a group of fourth-years could achieve, so the culprits had to be the Prewett brothers, whose shoes the Marauders were desperately trying to fill.

Potter could be blamed in a roundabout way.

If not for him, the third-floor Charms corridor wouldn't have been blocked off, so Severus and Lily wouldn't have had to take a detour across the Clock Tower Courtyard, where a wayward jinx from an impromptu duel shrunk Lily's right arm to the size of a cucumber. Severus wouldn't have rushed her to the Hospital Wing, and they wouldn't have got caught in the Prewetts' latest attempt to traumatise an entire school: a Rocket Charm cast on every bed in the infirmary set to send each one and its occupant into the lake, combined with a giant Bubble-Head Charm so that the troublemakers wouldn't be sent to Azkaban for manslaughter.

Lily sighed and rested her chin on her knees. "The film's got magic in it. I think you'd like it."

"Muggles don't understand magic." He sounded dismissive even to his own ears, and he hated it, hated how often he put his foot in it and how, every time, Lily's expression got darker and darker, as though she was slowly realising that he wasn't worth the effort.

"Their imaginations make up for it," she said, her tone as chilly as the waters around them.

Backtracking was his safest option. He knew that. He was a man at a precipice, teetering on the edge, desperate to backpedal to safety but rocking towards the abyss instead. "How does imagination equal magic?"

A withering glare was her only answer, yet Severus knew that even though he'd had the last word, he'd lost the argument. His next step should be to apologise, maybe even grovel a bit, but begging for forgiveness wasn't something he took lightly, not when he could still feel the bruises on his back from last month when his father had caught him apologising over a broken glass.

Lily was nothing like Tobias Snape. All she needed was an apology, and she would forgive Severus without rancour or malice. Still, his throat clenched at the thought of forcing the words out, stomach squeezing impossibly tight as though he hadn't eaten in days.

He couldn't do it.

They sat in silence, not a sound to be heard other than their heavy breathing and pounding hearts. The forced calm was more overbearing than the weight of the water around them until Lily huffed and said, "This is silly. We aren't just going to wait here for rescue, are we?"

That didn't sound like such a bad idea to Severus. Waiting was the smart thing to do. It limited how much else could go wrong, but Lily had the fever-bright look of an idea in her eyes, and he'd disappointed her enough for one day.

She tied back her hair and took out her wand. "The air bubble is attached to the bed, right? So if we levitate the bed, the bubble will follow?"

Severus nodded even as his brain ran through countless scenarios in which this idea went horribly wrong.

"I'll cast the Levitation Charm, and you'll cast a Wind Charm to propel us upwards, okay?"

Again, he nodded. He got the easy part of the task. If his spell failed, it would delay them, but that was all. Lily would be doing the heavy lifting—literally and figuratively.

She cast her spell, and the bed floated above the sandy bottom of the lake. Taking a deep breath, Severus followed her lead. The current buffeted them, making his stomach churn, but he kept his gaze on Lily, whose smile grew with every metre the bed rose. They sailed through the Great Lake, drifting through the inky blackness towards the light.

When they finally broke the water's surface, emerging into the light of day, Lily whooped and threw her arms around Severus's neck, making his heart soar.

Shouts and cheers rang out from the lakeshore, where teachers and students had gathered for a rescue mission. Severus ignored them as he wrapped his arms around Lily and held her tight.


End file.
